Following the pattern of The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is significantly darker than its predecessor. How dark you may ask? While it never reaches the blackness of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End's pre-title hanging of children, this is a Disney movie that opens with the assassination attempt of the title character (Ben Barnes) at the hands of his government. Where are the talking badgers?! Seriously, Prince Caspian, possibly the hardest PG in history, is largely concerned with jarringly adult issues that you may have to explain to the little ones in the crowd, issues like treason, murder, and betrayal. The Narnia flicks are heavy on the religious allegories, so perhaps the bloodshed should be expected, but it really is surprising to see a Disney movie with this much carnage. Perhaps it's even more surprising that it works. Every element of Prince Caspian feels more confident and assured than the first film, as if the entire team in front of and behind the camera have grown up. Significantly better than its predecessor, Prince Caspian is the biggest surprise of the year to date, a film that is very unlikely to dissatisfy fans of the franchise (except for the hardcore Lewis fans who feel the need to blog about the book-to-screen changes) and may even bring people turned off by the turgid pace of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe back to Narnia.

It could be because the stakes have been raised and the cute creatures have been put on the back burner (unless you consider Peter Dinklage “cute”), but there's a serious nature to Prince Caspian that will eventually draw in even the most jaded fantasy fan. After the assassination attempt, Caspian leaves his fortress, the home of the Telmarines, a people of undefined Mediterranean accent who have taken over the land of Narnia, and heads for the magical forest that surrounds it. In Narnia, it's been over a millennium since the first film - one year on this side of the wardrobe can be hundreds on the other - and the fantasy world has been pushed to the fringes and turned into legend. One of those myths is the tale of the "Kings and Queens of Old", better known to moviegoers as the Pevensies - Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley) - who, according to legend, will return to save the Narnians from the Telmarines. It turns out that the bridge between those two cultures is Caspian, an expelled, natural leader who, along with the Pevensies, builds an army of minotaurs, sword-wielding mice, and dwarves to battle the corrupt regime.

The first hour of Prince Caspian succumbs a bit to the pacing problems of the first film, where everything is drawn out and self-important, but when the action kicks in, director Andrew Adamson finds a visceral energy that has been missing from the fantasy genre of late. A majority of Caspian is made up of two extended battle sequences, one in the Telmarine fortress and one on the plains surrounding the magical forest, and both display the increased maturity of everyone involved, including a group of young actors that have gotten significantly better and a director who knows how to pace a movie this daunting more crisply than he did the first time around. Caspian is far-from-perfect, but it's a film about believing in a magical land (and a lion with a clear parallel to Jesus) and, despite your better judgment, you may easily find yourself sucked into the fantasy, much like the Pevensie children.

Rating: THREE BONES

Release Date: May 16th, 2008

Rating: PG

Starring: Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Ben Barnes, Peter Dinklage, Warwick Davis, Sergio Castellitto, Liam Neeson, and Tilda Swinton

Director: Andrew Adamson

Writers: Andrew Adamson & Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely